or turn to examine American faces a few seconds after their eyes had taken it in; if I would one day see American streets choked with people who don't know ex- acdy where they're going but don't feel safe where they are; and if I would someday feel uncontrollably grateful to be able to get my laundry done and to find simple commerce persisting in spite of madness. I wondered if the wars I'd gone looking for would someday come looking for us. Travelling in the Third World, I've found that to be an American some- times means to be wondrously cele- brated, to excite a deep, instantaneous loyalty in complete strangers. In the southern Philippines, a small delega- tion headed by a village captain once asked that I take steps to have their clan and their collection of two dozen huts placed under the protection of the United States. Later, in the same region, a teen -age Islamic separatist guerrilla among a group I'd been staying with begged me to adopt him and take him to America. In Mghanistan, I encoun- tered men who, within minutes of meet- ing me, offered to leave their own wor- ried families and stay by my side as long as I required it, men who found medi- cine somewhere in the ruins of Kabul for me when I needed it, and who never asked for anything back-all simply be- cause I was American. On the other hand, I think we sense- but don't care always to apprehend-the reality that some people hate Amer- ica. To many suffering souls, we must seem incomprehensibly aloof and self- centered, or worse. For nearly a century, war has rolled lopsidedly over the world, crushing the innocent in their homes. For hili that century; the United States has been seen, by some people, as keep- ing the destruction rolling without get- ting too much in the way of it-has been seen, by some people, to lurk be- hind it. And those people hate us. The acts of terror against this country-the hijackings, the kidnappings, the bomb- ings of our airplanes and barracks and embassies overseas, and now these mass atrocities on our own soil-tell us how much they hate us. They hate us as peo- ple hate a bad God, and they'll kill themselves to hurt us. On Thursday, as I write in New York City, which I happened to be visiting at 30 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 24,2001 the time of the attack, the wind has shifted, and a sour electrical smoke trav- els up the canyons between the tall buildings. I have now seen two days of war in the biggest city in America. But imagine a succession of such days stretching into years-years in which explosions bring down all the great buildings, until the last one goes, or until _ ,,-,^,:.._,t<<,. ' Y' ::#": , , < !: ' ,0-, ' :\:> ';.; .:-: "t.. '.. :' ',...." ',,' t... \' :'11 .....". . " .' . . ;.;" 'O. " , . _ , . , , , ' '!+;,:', ' :. ! :,";ì,i : ;'i(' ,'..,..,':::::;:, " r:ci '.i-;(/y\' "" '; :{ , . re {; tit bothering to bring the last one down is just a waste of ammunition. Imag- ine the people who have already seen years like these turn into decades- imagine their brief lifetimes made up oruy of days like these we've just seen in New York. -Denis Johnson . W aking the next morning-was that sleep, at any point?-you find the unwanted memory waiting. There's nothing new about this if you've lived awhile. Waking comes and at first oruy that, and then the flood of what can't be undone. One such moment came the day after Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles-the polls had just closed out there, late enough here so that you were watching him speak on the lit- de bedroom television, with the lights out and someone already asleep next to you in the dark room. Bobby holding up that bit of paper and saying, ' d now it's on to Chicago. . . ," and you getting up to go over to click off the T when it changed, the world changed, and you woke up the sleeper with your cries and did away with one more night of decent sleep for her. The next morning, you both awoke bereft and older-the whole country felt this way-and in need of re- vision. This week has been different but the same: how innocent we were back then in the sixties and back last Monda)'. When the second tower came down, you cried out once again, seeing it on the tube at home, and hurried out onto the street to watch the writhing fresh cloud lift above the buildings to the south, down at the bottom of this amazing and untouchable ci but you were not surprised, even amid such shock, by what you found in yourself next and saw in the faces around you-a bump of excitement, a secret momentary glow. Something is happening and I'm still here. You recognize the survivor's spasm from a lifetime of bad news: your neigh- bor's son's car crash, your tennis part- ner's blastoma, Chernobyl, or the Co- pacabana fire, or putting on the same sombre tie before another irreplaceable friend's memorial service. This is not to be borne, but still . . . Such days and moments pass, in ways that this one has not, but there's a weary strength in experience, even in the midst of horror. In the very first ghasdy down- town explosion we can remember, the package arrived by horse and wagon. We're in a new kind of war, they keep saying now, but we've been to wars be- fore. Old people have been there, there's that to be said for us, and sometimes we've even allowed ourselves a moment of dumb pride in it. Laughing a little at Tom Brokaw's goo about our genera- tion, groaning at the choir music behind the tides to "Band of Brothers," we can think, I was in that s too, but in truth what we've been good at all this time is bystanding. Our own war felt like im- mensely long and tedious stretches of ' d now for something completely dif- ferent!" with people dying in gigantic numbers but mostly somewhere else. All this time, we've forced ourselves to imagine what it was like to be there- in Guadalcanal, in Stalingrad, at Khe Sanh, in Sarajevo and Belfast and Pales- tine-and found the apparatus wanting. Bad news is unimaginable, but it keeps on coming and keeps on ending, as the distandy awful or immediately scary wears down into Then and, in time, to Back Then. Pearl Harbor came in the middle of a Sunday-afternoon bridge game at college. A first friend went down piloting a Navy bomber in Louisiana, in training, and there were more. Guys in our troopship bay whose luck ran out at Saipan. A brother-in-law shot again and again and lying for two days on the field at Belfort Gap-he persists, smiles gently, bent over his canes. We woke up to Hiroshima, Dallas came at lunchtime, and My Lai by slow